States of Inquiry is an ambitious, sprawling book that foregrounds the fact that in the nineteenth century, the British and American governments were the most prolific publishers in their countries. Both governments produced countless reports of their countries’ social, natural, economic, and historical circumstances in the mode of what author Oz Frankel calls “print statism,” an era in which fact-finding enterprises rendered both the state and its publics as objects of knowledge. Raising more questions than providing definitive theories, Frankel's account offers a thoughtful if cursory framework within which to conceive of print statism and then expansive accounts, first, of the operations of governments as publishers and, then, of the work of social investigators as authors.

Frankel suggests that in Britain and the United States, state printing concretized a nationalized public sphere, not the bourgeois public sphere depicted by Jürgen Habermas but rather a polyvalent site whose segmentation was part of its story. Both national governments took as their state-sponsored subjects the representation of marginalized or “undiscovered” groups within their own countries: the impoverished and uneducated working classes in Britain and Native Americans and freed slaves in the United States. The reports of Frankel's study offer a fascinating glimpse into a world of investigation and reportage that preceded and ushered in the highly regulated and homogenized field of social science and political reportage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the nineteenth century, however, the dispatch and publication of government-sponsored reports was an extension of government and of the government's presentation of itself as knowing entity.

By choosing to detail both British and American government-produced information, Frankel invites, but does not push heavily, comparison and implicit contrast between the two governments. Most distinctly, British government publications promote reform and mass education, not simply of the blackened coal miners and unparented children of their studies but also of the lawmakers and poor-rate payers upon whom reform relied. In contrast, U.S. government publications were often entrepreneurial affairs, spearheaded by individuals who offered first-person accounts of the American West or the Iroquois nation as important information that would advance the country's progress and self-understanding, while serving personal ambitions.

The story of British print statism is one of an increasingly centralized repository of knowledge. Where previous information was generated and dispersed, widely and unevenly, by clergymen, magistrates, physicians, and other local observers, the central government in London consolidated social research and oversaw its dissemination to the largest number of readers through the commercial press. Frankel points to the poor-law investigation of 1832–34 as the first coupling of a royal commission of inquiry with the mass circulation of printed texts relaying information about that inquiry. The government was not the sole publisher of information relating to the poor laws; its interest spurred on and was accompanied by publications from reform organizations, private booksellers, and parliamentary printers and even short stories by Harriet Martineau, as commissioned by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The mass production of information surrounding political debates became a recurring event throughout the nineteenth century. As the century progressed, the British government expanded its publications capacity and began producing blue book reports in numbers that became the source of sharp satire and public pride. Frankel argues that the growing historic repository and self-referentiality of blue books further endowed the state with a form of institutionalized memory and unified subjectivity that itself came to represent British nineteenth-century governance. But exposure was shared by government and its subjects together, as Frankel observes: “Unlike Foucault's supposition that post-Enlightenment societies are those of the panopticon and not of the spectacle, it appears that with public investigations the visibility of the Victorian state and the visibility of the populace were indivisible, concurrent, and often spectacular” (172).

In the United States, an interest in historical, geological, and sociological publishing projects grew as those with firsthand knowledge of the country's foundations expired. As in Britain, U.S. government-sponsored publications expanded in the early 1800s and continued to increase until the early decades of the twentieth century. From the 1840s to the 1860s, the U.S. government spent between one-quarter and one-third of its total budget funding and publishing reports on expeditions, explorations, and scientific enterprises that brought the unknown into the realm of government knowledge. States of Inquiry conveys that the government-funded accounts of expeditions were fed not simply by the ambitions of the individual authors or the government's interest in facilitating commerce or public policy but also by the public's voracious appetite to consume representations of an American “imperial self” (133).

Much of the strangeness and frustration of States of Inquiry comes in the second half of the book as Frankel provides detailed accounts of individual commissions and authors whose projects range from noble to nutty. Frankel is a diligent historian, providing a wealth of detail within which to get lost. Like the Victorian narratives it describes, States of Inquiry's subjects come across in a range of heterogeneous details that become less interpretable as they pile up. This is not necessarily a weakness but rather a tribute to the rich and complex subject Frankel has opened up for further debate. States of Inquiry is a fruitful and provocative contribution to the histories of government, print culture, and public spheres.